Is downloading every module really that much of a hassle? I maintain a local CPAN mirror on the Bioinformatics server up at school, and it's only 2.3G large. If size if really that much of an issue you could cut this down considerably by using merlyn's article on Mirroring your own mini-CPAN.

If I were doing this I would probably use a Mini-CPAN because you're probably not interested in older module versions.

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Re: A master-list of module dependencies?
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Not really, but it seems that this information should already be out there. As far as I can tell, it's not. So I'm in the process of generating my own list. What I'm doing:

If there is a .meta file available, I use that,

otherwise I download the module, extract the Makefile.PL
and do some simple parsing using a module I wrote called
Module::MakefilePL::Parse
(since Module::Depends
uses modules which do not work well on Windows -- ironically this was one of the reasons I started on this project)

It seems to me that you are still expected to develop your own custom rsync/cron configuration to mirror CPAN. Frankly, that's too much effort for an ordinary developer; it's easier to just use CPANPLUS, or suffer on when you're offline.

I think if there were HOWTOs for platforms, e.g. MacOS X, each BSD, each Linux distribution, more people would be mirroring CPAN (e.g. on their laptops).

The intersection set between Perl application developers and those who are willing to invest half a day in setting up a CPAN mirror may not be that large. I know that the payoff isn't good enough for me, but I would do it if it were cheaper in terms of effort.

That took me about 10 minutes to set up the very first time, which really isn't half of a day. Extending it to any Unix-ish system (such as Linux, BSD or MacOSX) should take about 5 minutes. That's much less than half of a day. Unless you live on a planet like Mercury. :P